Posts tagged "proprioceptors"
Yoga for Bad Ankles
Ankle Sprains lead to Bad Balance
Back in the mid-1960s, a physician, wondering why his patients so often suffered one ankle sprain after another, asked his patients to stand on their injured leg (after it recovered). Usually, they wobbled badly, having to put their foot down much sooner than people who’d never sprained an ankle. With this simple experiment, the doctor made an important discovery - people with bad ankles have bad balance. What if you treat the balance problem, will it improve the ankle function? No one thought of this until now!
A New Treatment for Bad Ankles
That conclusion is only now making its way into the treatment of chronically unstable ankles. Patrick McKeon, an assistant professor in the Division of Athletic Training at the University of Kentucky, doesn’t really know why it has taken so long.
Most Common Sports Injury
They’re the most commonly injured body part in sports. Eight million people sprain an ankle each year in Europe. Millions of those same people will then go on to sprain that same ankle, or their other ankle, in the future. McKeon says, “The recurrence rate for ankle sprains is at least 30 percent, and … it may be high as 80 percent.”
Successive Sprains
Many of those second successive sprains could be avoided with an easy exercise. Stand on one leg. Balance for a minute and repeat. Sounds familiar? The Yoga tree pose.
Balance Exercises
This balance exercise, is a well-documented approach to dealing with unstable ankles. A number of studies have shown that the treatment can be quite beneficial. Six weeks of balance exercises, begun soon after a first ankle sprain, reduced the risk of another sprain. The training also lessens, the chances of suffering a first sprain at.
Ankle Sprains Damage your Proprioceptors
Doctors thought that ankle sprains were primarily a matter of overstretched, traumatized ligaments. Tape the joint, relieve pressure on the sore tissue, and the ankle should heal, they thought. But that ignored the role of the central nervous system. “There are neural receptors in ligaments,” says Jay Hertel, an expert on the ankle, at the University of Virginia and. When you damage the ligament, “you damage the neuro-receptors as well. Your brain no longer receives reliable signals”. Your proprioception is impaired and you are more prone to falling over and re-injuring yourself.
Balance Exercises Repair the Proprioceptors
Some people wobble for about a month after an initial ankle sprain, and then it disappears; for others it may continue and become permanent. Researchers don’t yet know why. But they believe that balance exercises can return the joint and its proprioception to normal.
The Tree Pose
All you need to do is to practice the Tree pose two or three minutes a day, and when you find that too easy do it with your eyes closed and when that is not challenging then you can hop. If you want to advance even further then do the balance pose while standing on a pillow or more difficult variations that we teach at the Yoga Center Madrid.
